Stillhouse Junkies Release Small Towns as They Ride the Momentum

Stillhouse Junkies recently returned from a European tour—just a couple of years later than they had planned. Back in early March of 2020, they played a big release party for Calamity, the album they recorded in Austin in November 2019. They planned to leave for England in March 2020, with tickets bought, shows booked, and momentum for a full year of promotion for the album when COVID shut down everyone’s plans. 

Alissa Wolf, the band’s fiddler, said, “We only waited three or four weeks before we decided we couldn’t isolate from each other any longer. We created our own little pod and we did a lot of playing and rehearsing together.” They developed a twice-a-month virtual concert series called Sidecar featuring bands from all over the country—“people that were already friends or people we wanted to build relationships with,” according to Wolf. There were two main acts and a ‘tweener’ for each show, and the series ran from November 2020 through March of the following year.

The Junkies also created the Rolling Revue, an outdoor pop-up series that had them playing over 250 small live sets all around Durango and throughout the county. Guitarist Fred Kosak said, “We let people sign up for a slot, then we’d drive to their house, get out of the van and play in their driveway or front yard for whomever was listening for a half hour or so.” The grassroots-style curb tours continued through summer into the fall until the weather was too cold for outside performances. “We were the only band that was doing anything like that in our area. We got some new fans that didn’t even know we existed before,” he added.

Cody Tinnin, the band’s bassist, noted how much they valued the community support. Rather than charging a prearranged amount for performances, they set out a tip jar. He said, “When we started in late April, we might only be playing for a married couple or a family of four. Literally, we would stand twenty feet away from whoever lived in the house and play. As the summer went on, there were more socially distant gatherings in cul-de-sacs and yards that were bigger.” The tips, along with grants and help from IBMA and other foundations, he said, helped them pay their bills during the lean months. 

Now, two years later, the Stillhouse Junkies are releasing their newest album Small Towns, produced by Stephen Mougin at Dark Shadow Recording, whom the band met in at the 2021 World of Bluegrass gathering in Raleigh in the wake of their “Momentum Band of the Year” win. The project started as an EP. Cody said, “We had a few songs in the pipeline about small towns. We had one about Mancos, Colorado, a small town west of Durango. We had a song about Leadville, Colorado, at the time, and Evergreen–a couple of these songs already were starting to become part of the live show.” Before long, they had enough songs for a full album.  “More than enough,” added Alissa.

While a lot of songwriters write about small towns and places they’ve been, Kosak noted, it had become something of a theme for Stillhouse Junkies. “We’re all from small towns,” he said, “and it’s fun to write about places that haven’t had songs written about them. If you’re the first person to ever write a song about Mancos, Colorado, for people in Mancos, you are immediately their hero. When we get to play a song we wrote about a town in the town—which we’ve gotten to do a few times— they appreciate it. It’s a cool way to connect.” 

Cody came up with the song idea for “Moonrise Over Ridgway,” one of the singles already released from the upcoming album. He said, “Ridgway is just a small town that has always been good to the band. We had some great shows there early on, and I’ve been pleased with our fans there. It’s always been in my mind to write a song about it.” The song is not typical bluegrass fare. According to Cody, it was loosely inspired by Star Trek episodes. “It’s kind of a sci-fi thing about two cowboys trying to get some medicine for this outbreak in the town where they live. On their way, they come across some aliens that abduct them and then drop them back in time where they first picked them up after they realize they made a mistake,” he explained, “but you might never get that from the lyrics.” 

In their songwriting, the band members noted, they try to skirt the usual bluegrass tropes, finding their own way of saying things and keeping a sense of humor. While the band doesn’t do true co-writing, Fred pointed out, “once somebody brings a song to the rest of the band, we arrange the song collaboratively.” He noted that he has written most of the band’s songs, but once someone brings a song to the group, they all participate in writing and polishing up the instrumental parts and different grooves, he noted. “When I’m working on something, I know these guys will come up with something even better than what I would have thought of. I’m sure these guys would say the same.”

Cody added that anything he has written “goes through a dramatic and good change when the band gets involved. All of us try to have fifty percent ready to go, but everything evolves from the first time we hear it.”

The obvious chemistry between the individual band members started to develop soon after the trio met in Durango, Colorado, in 2017. All three moved to Colorado, leaving behind successful careers in other fields, but none came with the intention of pursuing a musical career. 

“We all knew we were ready for a transition,” says Fred Kosak, who plays guitar and mandolin with the band and handles a lot of the lead vocals, “but we didn’t know what that was going to be exactly. A lot of people move to Colorado with that kind of mindset: ‘I’m out.’ Durango is in the middle of nowhere; it’s definitely not the big city. We were all open to whatever happened,” and what happened, he said, felt natural.

Tinnin had been working as a chef in the Atlanta area after several years in Austin, Texas, when he decided to move back to Colorado. Wolf, a classically trained violinist who plays fiddle with the band, walked away from a comfortable position in corporate sales in the DC area. Kosak arrived after teaching French and Chinese in a Boston high school for a decade.

Fred said, “Every time I’ve moved somewhere, I’ve leaned into the bluegrass community to tried to meet local musicians and make some friends.” He started to go to jams where he met Alissa and Cody in his first couple of weeks in Durango, but the three didn’t come together as a band until 2018.  

The band initially started playing a weekly residency at a local distillery, which gave them an audience and the opportunity to try out new material. It was, they say, their musical proving ground. 

Kosak said he had tried songwriting before, but once he got to Durango, the juices started flowing. He said, “We got to a point, maybe a year in, when we were playing a lot of original music, so that became our identity rather than jamming the covers and bluegrass standards we started out playing. That was where we developed our sound.”

At the distillery, the band could try out new things in the low-pressure environment. “Everyone was drinking strong cocktails during the show—myself included—and we were able to throw things at the wall and see what stuck,” says Kosak. The original material they developed there became part of the band’s regular rotation of music.

They played the distillery about ninety times in their first couple of years as a band. When they applied to play a slot at Durango’s mid-April bluegrass festival, the Meltdown, they realized they needed a name. At that point, they had only played together at a distillery, so they brainstormed a number of possibilities related to the band’s origins before settling on Stillhouse Junkies.

In 2018, they decided to make the band more of a formal venture and started playing out of town. They booked shows themselves, cold-emailing venues, mostly, says Wolf, and were eventually able to line up a busy schedule of out-of-town shows. Stillhouse Junkies developed their own flavor of bluegrass in part because of the varied talents and influences of the three members of the band. 

Before moving to Durango, Alissa had taken seven or eight years off from music. She had grown up playing classical music before deciding to try other styles.

“I tried really hard to be a bluegrass fiddle player,” said Wolf, “but it’s really hard to take the classical out of a classically trained violinist. I came to realize I was never going to be a trad bluegrass player, so I decided I was going to make up my own thing.”

Her improvisational style works in this band, she said, “because Fred writes a lot of music that lets me use a lot of my classical technique and mix it in with the bluegrassy stuff I’ve learned to do. Improvising has always been where my heart is.” She said when she discovered she could play jazz, bluegrass, and other styles without having to read music on stage, “that was when it clicked for me. I thought, ‘That’s why I’m playing music!’ I will never take my classical training for granted, but that love for improvisation is where I am now.” 

Kosak pointed out that in addition to their instrumental contributions, all three share vocal duties. “I do most of the lead vocals,” he said, “because I’ve written the largest chunk of our original material, but we all sing lead, and we do three-part harmony on every song.” 

After moving back to Colorado, Cody began to focus on old time music in 2017, where he finds a lot of his musical inspiration. He joined Stillhouse Junkies later that year.

The three members of the group bring different talents and interests to the group. Cody says the majority of his listening is old time music, including the “new old time” coming out of Nashville. Alissa has been diving into Sara and Sean Watkins, Western Centuries, and a whole rotation of fiddle players. Fred says he listens to some musicians for instrumental inspiration and others for songwriting, from Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott to Rush and any number of English rock bands from the 60s and 70s. 

They also noted that they don’t have to depend on recordings for inspiration, since so many of the musicians they look up to are approachable. Alissa said that whenever she reaches out to other bluegrass musicians she admires, asking for a Skype session to pick their brains, every single one of them has been happy to connect.

With a successful 2022 European tour behind them, an IBMA award, and an album launch of Small Towns at Nashville’s iconic Station Inn on September 10th, Stillhouse Junkies are set to ride the “Momentum” for which they were recognized in 2021 as they bring their music to fans in small towns and big cities alike.